Ideas for pre-made explosion graphic?

Coming straight to the point: creating graphic explosions is difficult for me. I really don't have much of an idea of where to start. I was hoping there were a few ideas out there to help me out. It would be much appreciated.

The game I'm currently working on is Papa Pizza Patrol (you may have heard the name mentioned somewhere else in the forum from Aarku). It's a side-scrolling, sprite-based game with a cartoony style. Below is a link of the general look of the game.

Do you have any particle systems?
That would be a good way to cheat out an explosion, just play with explosion particles. David's chopper crash/explosions were just particles with some gray foggy graphic and they looked great.

Maybe Daniel Lurie could help, he was making an explosion making application.

Daniel, put the beer down, get over here!

You objects however may not need to explode, the could be just as effective, damaged, smoking, and spiralling off the screen. The damaged objects themselves could become obstacles as they kamikazee toward the vehicle, or lay broken in the buggy's path. Just some thoughts.

You could also go comical Batman approach "Kazow" "Ker-bang" starbursts.

I agree that particle systems are the coolest way to go for explosions right now. ShowIEL is a free particle system viewer with a lot of interesting examples of what can be done (and a lot of lame ones too). Good luck! The concept sketch reminds me of Moon Patrol, and I LOVED that game.

Well, when I was poking around the system on day I found Apple's *poof* explosion thing. You could take that and colorize it, claiming it was heavily inspired by their design not stolen to the lawyers. . OR you could link you app directly to that resource and load it from it's place. Of course it would probably be smarter to look at their poof and se how a good cartoony explosion should work then make your own.

hmm, I am good atmaking animated explosion sprites, using prerendered hypervoxeled partical systems in Lightwave, but they are very literal looking, and might not fit with the crisp-line toon style of your game, still, if you want one, describe it and I'll do my best. Aside from that, in your game neat explosions would be ones which left puffs of smoke curling in the air (I would use two smoke puff sprites overlapping and turning in different directions as they grow larger and fade away) and it would be totally cool if little animated smoke trails came out and fell downwards with blazing debris, I have always found smokey explosions to be the most dramatic for me personally. It would probably be enough to use a three frame fire-sprite set and if you animate them nicely (skewing htem from the ships as they go down, blending htem out and shifting them behind hte ship as if being dragged by the wind) you could probably get quite nice results. Typically BANG! type explosion sprite sets start with a big bright fiery flash that goes from nothing to full size in 2-3 frames before darkening and burning offi n about ten frames as it is replaced by a smoke puff which then slowly dissolves. For firey explosions you need a lead in as flames puff out to their maximum over maybe ten frames, not expanding evenly but surging more and less, followed by a repeatable five-ten frames of burning/smoking animation and an ending thirty-sixty flames where the fire burns out and thne puffs sporadicly as the smoke fades.

All of you guys have been very helpful. Thank you! I think I have an idea where I'm going with this explosion. Aarku and I still have to discuss it, but we'll probably end up using particle system. I also agree, whogben, that debris adds a lot and we've talked about including that.

Here's what I'm envisioning: The UFO will get hit, start smoking, it will start to fall from the sky, and then it explodes in a fiery bang with smoking/falling debris. I think the smoke will be fairly easy to create. I'm still a little worried about the actual explosion part, but you guys pointed me to several ideas and we'll see how they pan out.

Time to get to work . . . any more suggestions -- bring'em on!
I'm going to look at Apple's "poof" explosion right now.